Joel Aparicio, Photography

Artist Statement

By airbrush colorizing and “digitizing” B&W photographic prints, I want to give a sense of oversaturated HDR landscapes. While standing at a distance, where the artwork appears phone size in scale to the viewer, one cannot discern that it is no longer a pic. Neither can the algorithms driving your smartphone’s camera. The analog artifacting I create is digitally airbrushed out, dismissed by the machine.

Neo-Impressionist Divisionist painters, notably Georges Seurat, upset the status quo of the “classically” trained painters who populated the Salon in the late nineteenth century. Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon was a labor of refined technique, and forever cemented him and his art with Pointillism. Just as the airbrush has led to my own visual aesthetic. During Seurat’s time, photography as a medium was fighting to legitimize its place in Fine Art. By being able to capture the extreme detail and accuracy that painters spent a lifetime practicing their technique to achieve, the photographer could reproduce in the “Blink of an Eye” the picturesque landscape that lay before the painter. As a photographer, I seek to capture the Pointillist painting technique with airbrushed photographs.

Traversing the line between painter and photographer. I take landscapes of the surrounding Pacific Northwest. A critique on how easily something can be dismissed as the viewer swipes. Replicating the Screen with a screen. Creating an artwork that cannot be resolved without pause, cannot be duplicated, and certainly is not immediate. The outsider looking in, refusing to seek shelter in the familiar, or fit in the crowd. Freeing oneself of the expected, hanging on the edge of a cliff between the high and low, the liked, or dismissed.

Image: Looking Thru A Screen III. Acrylic ink airbrushed on digital inkjet print / 50 x 64 in.